Re: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?( is it between microgenesis and ontogenesis?)

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

eric--
 
I think that BOTH your example and Professor Smagorinsky's paper (for which many thanks) really DO help to clarify the concept of boundaries.
 
I come to the word "boundary" from the work of people like Ben Rampton, whose model is bilingualism, biracialism, bisexuality, and so on. Boundary crossing here really is "interactional" in the sense that our authors would like to see it: I become bilingual by crossing linguistic boundaries, from one language to another and back again. 
 
Professor Smagorinsky's paper notes that the "boundary" between theory and practice is honored in the breach in precisely this way: by emphasizing the need and the difficulty of bridging the gap we are indirectly acknowledging the gap as a real phenomenon and prizing the ability of a few preternaturally endowed persons amongst us to scuttle back and forth across the divide.
 
There IS a real divide which we need help negotiating as teachers, and it's a divide that teacher education alone can overcome. It's really not between "theory" and "practice". It's  between the genetic laws that govern ontogenesis, child development from year to year, and those that govern microgenesis, changes in knowledge states from moment to moment. 
 
These two things are not the same; the boundary between them is very real, and it is (as we know) NOT addressed by Piaget and the constructivists (for whom development "explains" learning) and ignored by most other approaches (for whom developmetn just IS learning). 
 
What eric suggests is that there is also a real boundary which belies the unreal divorce between theory and practice which Smagorinsky, Cook and Johnson seek to overcome by the concept (which unlike "knowledge" is a real link between microgenesis and ontogenesis). Your example suggests a real boundary between the NC and the lesson goals. 
 
As eric says, this boundary is real, but it's an artefact of the (sometimes genuinely destructive, occasionally helpful, but mostly irrelevant) attempt of people outside the classroom to have their say about what goes on inside, by means of guidelines, goals, achievement targets, etc. That's what I meant by the underlying issue of class conflict.
 
Now, here's my question, which I think picks up some of Professor Smagorinsky's criticisms of the way Engestrom's triangle is dragged in by its long hairy ears at the drop of a business consulting hat. Why do we have to classify these guidelines, goals, achievement targets etc. as "tools" and not as, say, "rules" or "division of labor" or whatever? 
 
I think the "expanded triangle" has both TOO MANY categories (because it really separates out things like "tools" and "rules" and "division of labor" that are not, in practice, any different from each other) and NOT ENOUGH (because, for example, it does NOT distinguish between tools and signs, two things that behave very differently in terms of their orientation to objects). Worse, it does not differentiate between object-as-product and object-as-process. 
 
In what sense is a "learning trajectory" an "object of activity"? A training programme does not produce "learning trajectories"--at the very most, it can produce exam scores, diplomas, certificates and so on. "Learning trajectories" are neither produced, exchanged, nor consumed in anything but an extremely dull metaphor. Despite the way we may feel some days, learning is not the consumption of teachers.  
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 
 


On Tue, 9/14/10, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:


From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?( is it between scientific and everyday concepts?)
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 9:22 AM


Being a psychology major I brought my ideas pertaining to learning 
theories to the table when I began my studies for becoming a teacher.  I 
was amazed that the majority of my classes had nothing to do with how to 
provide environments where student experienced genuine learning but rather 
focused on classroom management and providing ‘checklist style’ lesson 
plans. 

The current paper for discussion certainly addresses a core issue of 
education.  I have been a ‘student/teacher’ as well as a mentor and have 
discovered the difficulties faced when the ‘scientific thinking’ of 
academia conflict with the ‘everyday thinking’ of being a teacher.  Where 
the boundary is in this I am not quite clear other than the dept of 
Education does the telling, the university does the disseminating of the 
department’s telling and the student/teacher is left to practice in the 
reality of the classroom.

Teaching in an alternative program I have never had to provide syllabus’ 
for my classes because the instruction and the outcome are specifically 
the same.  Is the student attending the science museum explorer’s club and 
do they have the project completed?  Is the student writing the resume, 
filling out applications, scheduling job interviews and following through 
with employment?  At what level of independence does the student operate? 
Now a new regime shift has directed us to provide syllabus’ for our 
classes, the new administrator's don’t want the syllabus' to appear in the 
‘everyday thinking’ style of the questions above they want goals, outcomes 
attached to MN state standards.  Is this possible to do?  Of course it is 
possible but it has nothing to do with student success, if it did we 
wouldn’t have the 75% graduation rate (twice the national average for 
special education students) we have experienced over the past 15 years. 
Successful curriculum writing has nothing to do with genuine learning but 
everything to do with complying to the political winds of the time.  How 
this is a boundary I really truly don't know.

what do others think?
eric




From:   MICHAEL W SMITH <mwsmith@temple.edu>
To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:   09/14/2010 11:02 AM
Subject:        Re: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?
Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu



I share David’s concern with understanding just what a boundary is.  I’d
like to add an additional question: How does one determine what boundaries
are relevant?  Put another way, how does the analytic help one identify 
the
activity systems in operation and hence the boundaries that one needs to
examine.  The authors posit two systems:  the DTE and the cooperating
schools.  They posit the existence of these systems but don’t appear to
derive them empirically.  That is, if the DTE and the schools are, in 
fact,
the systems that are germane, one would be able to find sufficient
similarities in the "general object,"  in the rules, in the tools, and in
the division of labor across cooperating schools, small groups, 
supervisors,
and so on.  As Peter pointed out in his initial post and as he has argued 
in
his own research (Smagorinsky & O’Donnell-Allen, 1998, for example), it
might be a mistake to assume those similarities.  The key system, then, 
might
be much smaller--an idioculture and not a culture.  In such a 
circumstance,
investigating borders would not be investigating the spaces between the 
DTE
and the schools, say, but would be investigating the spaces between the
small groups in Extract 2 and the DTE (or a particular university class) 
or
investigating the spaces between the supervisor-student teacher-mentor 
group
and both the particular cooperating school and the DTE in Excerpt 4.  My
worry about positing the larger structures first is that doing so might 
keep
one from observing boundaries that are more important.


On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:40 PM, David Kellogg 
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> First of all, many many thanks to Professor Peter Smagorinsky for his
> incisive but very fair summary of the study, and above all for opening 
up
> issues that really go far beyond the study itself.
>
> As we see! With all due respect to Professor Engestrom and the folks at 
the
> Change Lab, I think that the issue of profit, and salaries, and even
> critical peer review and publishing is much more interesting to the 
writers
> of a study than it is to its readers. So I think that Professor
> Smagorinsky's understanding reflects, accurately, the reader's point of
> view.
>
> It certainly reflects mine. Studies like the one that Professor 
Engestrom
> reports on in "Perspectives in Activity Theory" (CUP 1999: 377-404) as
> essentially examples of business consultancy discourse, in that they 
focus
> on enhancing collaborative production, often through negotiated
> consensus, and leave the underlying issues of class conflict in the
> background. Nevertheless, it seems to me that precisely these issues are 
the
> key to understanding the 'boundary" concept.
>
> I usually have a lot of trouble with articles like this. I am a deep
> breathing reader, and I can stay under water for a very long time 
without a
> good definition. But my imagination (and understanding) is too visual 
and
> concrete and I cannot really even begin to get a good picture of what 
the
> author is going on about unless I have a good example.
>
> And I find I don't really get a good example of the "boundary" concept
> until p. 223, where we get a pretty clear boundary between what the 
trainees
> have been told to do as trainees and what they will actually do as 
teachers.
> This comes up again near the end, where there is a boundary set between
> "goals" (as defined by the NC) and "work", as defined by the teachers.
>
> I found myself wondering, as I read the study, if this boundary is not a
> temporary mirage created by the fact that we are talking about 
PRE-SERVICE
> teacher education, a situation where the student teachers still have to 
jump
> through hoops to get their certification, and where, because the student
> teachers do not have the experienced teachers' source of authority, viz,
> their chalkface experience, they are more or less at the mercy of 
mentors,
> the professors, and of course the examiners.
>
> Pre-service programmes focus on what is teachable in preservice 
programmes.
> That is why they focus so much on lesson plans, which in real life are
> notorious unreliable guides to classroom interaction for the simple 
reason
> that they largely pre-empt it with "goals" and "targets" and "projected
> outcomes". They also focus on the kind of teaching knowledge that is
> statable and testable. But a great deal of this statable, plannable,
> rehearsable, and testable teaching knowledge is what Whitehead would 
call
> "inert" knowledge.
>
> For example: one of the really key problems that teachers face when they
> start teaching in English is being able to reduce questions to the point
> where they are manageable and then expand them again to the point where 
they
> are challenging to learners(who can be of widely varying degrees of
> proficiency, communicative capacity and even amiability). This was the 
point
> of the distinction our teacher Ms. Yi Minkyeong made between "nonverbal
> response wanted", "verbal response wanted", and  "verbal thinking 
wanted".
>
> This knowledge is not only largely unconscious, it is largely
> undescribable, because it includes (at least) three undescribed things:
> familiarity ("Have I said this before?"), structural complexity ("How 
long
> and complex is the question? What about the answer?"), conceptual 
complexity
> ("How concrete/visualizeable abstract/conceivable is the question? What
> about the answer?"). It's not the sort of thing we can teach in our
> pre-service programmes, although we are making some inroads with the
> in-service ones (where I am teaching this very afternoon).
>
> One of my grads is now studying the possibility of discarding the
> "artificial zone of proximal learning" of the pre-service programme
> altogether and going to the naturally occuring sort of "legitimate
> peripheral participation" that we find in apprenticeships, what we found 
in
> for centuries in the arts and even in teaching before colleges of 
education
> were invented. (I remember travelling on trucks in the Sudan and 
watching
> how young Sudanese boys learned to become "drivers" in this way.)
>
> Shin Jiyeong has already found a significant difference in one novice
> teacher in the use of visual prompts and also in what she calls
> "non-repetition questions", that is, questions which produce the target
> sentences (specified by the NC) without actually asking for "Listen and
> Repeat". This is interesting because Shin Jieun and Kellogg 2007 failed 
to
> find ANY improvement in another co-teacher in any part of the lesson 
EXCEPT
> the greeting.
>
> What makes the difference? I think that Jinyeong's apprenticeship is NOT 
a
> mentorship, where the relations found between examiners and examinees
> invariably reproduce themselves, and change the focus from the kind of
> indescribable knowledge we are looking for to the more describable sort.
> It's also NOT the crazy situation I started her out on (silly me) where 
the
> two teachers had to teach the same thing at opposite ends of the 
classroom
> looking at each other teach.
>
> First of all, the two teachers have good reasons to take turns watching 
and
> teaching. One is an inexperienced native speaker of English and the 
other is
> a highly expert non-native speaker, so they both have (different) things 
to
> do and so different things to look at.
>
> Secondly, there is a clear cycle of "watch this" and "now you have a go"
> for both teachers. It seems to me where the actual teaching "work" is 
not
> statable, this is essential: there is literally no other way for the
> knowledge to be internalized except through imitation, and the way our 
short
> term memories work, there has to be a very short window between the
> observation and the imitation for the imitation to be accurate and 
useful.
>
> Finally, there is, actually, an emergent concept, which neither teacher 
was
> aware of at the beginning of Jiyeong's research, and it's not "goal" 
whether
> of "work" or of "lesson" or of the NC. We started out just looking at 
what
> kinds of behaviors produced long answers (more than one word) from the 
kids,
> and we found to our distress that "Listen and Repeat" were virtually the
> only ones that did. I think the idea of a "non-imitative" or 
"non-repetitive
> question" is still a bit of a broad brush. But I also think that when 
the
> research is really done, this is where the real source of improvement 
will
> come in, and I think, not coincidentally, that this is where pre-service
> programmes really have to butt out.
>
> I was reading the "Boundary" article, I set up a gedankenexperiment, 
which
> I think reflects pretty well the kind of class conflict underlying the
> "boundary" concept. Let us say that there is a fundamental dispute over 
a
> curricular issue. Imagine, for example, that a party comes to power that
> wishes to remove a fundamental concept from the curriculum (e.g. the 
welfare
> state, or Norway's membership in the NATO alliance, participation in the
> invasion of Iraq, and active involvement in the Afghan War).
>
> Do I, as a teacher, want the decision making in the hands of a 
CONSERVATIVE
> teacher (they do exist; I have quite a few as grad students) or in the 
hands
> of a LIBERAL, even a RADICAL Department of Teacher Education?
>
> Well, OK, it's a thought experiment. The idea of a radical DTE is really 
a
> little like one of Einstein's relativistic trains, or Schrodinger's cat;
> there are none such, and none likely. But I think that in actual fact 
the
> real curricular decisions are ENTIRELY in the hands of the teacher, for 
much
> the same reason that decisions over learning are in the final analysis 
in
> the hands and heads of learners. And I think that's where they should be
> too.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>



-- 
Michael W. Smith
Professor and Chair
Department of Curriculum, Instruction,
and Technology in Education
Temple University
1301 Cecil B.Moore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19122
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